


Overlord's Peace

by PomoneCorse



Category: Tyranny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Red Riding Hood Elements, don't accept poisonned apples (or any other kind of fruit) from creepy old ladies, oh overlord what great teeth you have, the better to eat you with my sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 16:59:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16580444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PomoneCorse/pseuds/PomoneCorse
Summary: It all started, as most things do, with a secret.Not earth-shattering, city-slaying, howling like the wind from one corner of the empire to another. Instead, small and insignificant, it found its home in the hearts of men, and only grew from there.And then there was the Young Fatebinder, and thus fate was sealed.





	Overlord's Peace

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a 3am talk with [dutch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unluckywords/pseuds/unluckywords) (whose Fatebinder Island is a gem), on the subject of "what if Kyros was a dozen old people stacked under a trenchcoat"  
> so of course what better fic for the game's two year anniversary than this?
> 
> Enjoy, and please comment here or drop by [my tumblr](http://mademoisellegush.tumblr.com/)

It all started, as most things do, with a secret.

Not earth-shattering, city-slaying, howling like the wind from one corner of the empire to another. Instead, small and insignificant, it found its home in the hearts of men, and only grew from there.

No; it was, at first, only this: a family, quiet and servile to the Overlord’s vision, from which sprouted, every generation, a wild soul, disappearing eventually into the aether. And yet, for all the pain which they might have endured, the Athas prospered. Tracing their lineage from even before Kyros’ First Edict, proud of their pedigree as the centuries went on, they never asked why they were carefully kept and dispatched to the quietest postings.

Proud to serve, delighted to fulfill out the measure that Kyros had had for their skein.

And if their children did not- why, the branch was carefully trimmed from the tree, held up as example of how even they, even the most faithful and loyal, were not exempt of temptation and failure.

And then there was Thu’yri.

She became the Young Fatebinder, and thus her fate was sealed.

* * *

 

This was no throne room to battle it out in, no empty council hall. The empty reception hall had seemed to see use as the faltering beating heart of the shrinking Empire, battle plans scattered amongst rotten food and spoiled cloth, wine stains like the last

The Archon of Spires stood, bloody and disheveled, silver hair twisting in nonexistent currents like so many living tentacles. Behind her, through the gargantuan open door to the capitol, magic strong enough to topple mountains shook the ground; streets running wild with the flood of darkest liquid night and crimson fire.

A dozen shapes emerged from the shadows. Did they crawl? Did they bleed out of the shadows, nightmares congealing into flesh? Or were they always there, dispelling the cloud in her mind only when they willed?

“I’m not scared of you.” Her voice did not tremble, fingers stiff on the Staff of Hours. ”But she must be, to send you in her stead. Where is the tyrant?”

“Welcome, duhitṛ,” came a cavernous voice, resonating like a bronze bell.

“What?” Thu’yri stuttered, peering at the hooded figures. For all the power that had allowed her to face archons, to transform the face of Terratus, something in the room whispered to her in turn, back to the terrified child that had had to proclaim a first Edict.

“She is us,” came a dulcet, sickly-sweet voice before her.

The word echoed, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times.

“Look, then.”

At once, like eerie puppets, the figures lowered what the shadows revealed to be hoods. Old people, circling her, still and silent as she took in the tableau.

“But- Wait.” She grasped at anything to make sense of the situation. “Sirin sang you all of you to almost stab yourself- yourselves? She’d have told me if you were-”

“Oh, child. Use your eyes. We are not, well, just one person,” started a wizened old man on her left, heavy silver beard shaking as he spoke. Thu’yri snapped her gaze to his, shaken to find the exact same shade of amber as hers.

“And yet we cannot let people see the Overlord as anything but,” continued a merry-looking woman to her right, wrinkles bleeding out into tattoos typical of the furthest of the East’s isolated settlements in which Thu’yri had been sent for her thirteenth and fourteenth years. She must have been the great-great-aunt who had supposedly run to be a warlord, then. Her eyes had seen bloodshed, like Thu’yri’s, and something in the way she held herself called to mind her grandfather’s own mien.

“So Kyros must remain an idea,” whispered someone behind her.

“You understand, don’t you?” said the one right before her, a thin crone with almost caricatural features shifting like oil in water, holding up a platter of fruit.

And Thu’yri looked.

Her eyes were lost to the offering: jujubes and apples, dates and mandarins, dry and ripe mixed together; piled on a golden plate inlaid with silver and platinum swirls mimicking the room’s formless mosaics.

“Aren’t you hungry, child?”

“Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Aren’t you?” came a chorus of thin, reedy voices; of strong and powerful tenors and high, lilting sopranos, belying age and gender into a cacophony that filled her up like the warmest ray of sun in the heart of harvest, and the coldest bite of the wind in the dead of winter.

  
And Thu’yri felt.

Hungry, tired, lonely. What could one bite hurt? What would she gain, to swim forever against fate and fortune, alone against the might of the Overlord, and the puppeteers?

What did she care that there were people counting on her, drumming the beat of war from the southernmost tip of the Tiers to the heart of the Empire in the name of her rebellion? What did lover, what did friend, what did family mean in the face of this communion? Here before her stood the promise of intimacy without compare.

And Thu'yri swallowed the smallest of the dried jujubes.


End file.
